...screeching, lathered, plastered, soused, bloated, polluted, saturated, stinko...

The Lexicon of Prohibition

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Labor union members marching through Broad Street in protest of prohibition, New Jersey, October 31, 1931. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

In 1927, at the height of the United States’ 13-year, nationwide ban on the sale and import of alcoholic beverages, one of the country’s leading literary critics, Edmund Wilson, compiled and published a list that he titled, The Lexicon of Prohibition. It was a list of terms for drunkenness, arranged, he explained, “in order of the degrees of intensity of the conditions which they represent, beginning with the mildest stages and progressing to the more serious,” and it read as follows.

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• lit

• squiffy

• oiled

• lubricated

• owled

• edged

• jingled

• piffed

• piped

• sloppy

• woozy

• happy

• half screwed

• half cooked

• half shot

• half seas over

• fried

• stewed

• boiled

• bent

• sprung

• scrooched

• jazzed

• jagged

• canned

• corked

• corned

• potted

• hooted

• slopped

• tanked

• tight

• full

• wet

• high

• horseback

• liquored

• pickled

• ginned

• shicker (Yiddish)

• spifflicated

• primed

• organized

• featured

• pie-eyed

• cock-eyed

• wall-eyed

• glassy-eyed

• bleary-eyed

• hoary-eyed

• over the Bay

• four sheets in the wind

• crocked

• loaded

• leaping

• screeching

• lathered

• plastered

• soused

• bloated

• polluted

• saturated

• stinko

• blind

• stiff

• under the table

• wapsed down

• paralyzed

• ossifed

• out like a light

• passed out cold

• embalmed

• buried

• blotto

• lit up like the sky

• sit up like the commonwealth

• lit up like a Christmas tree

• lit up like a store window

• lit up like a church

• fried to the hat

• slopped to the ears

• stewed to the gills

• boiled as an owl

• full as a tick

• loaded for bear

• loaded to the muzzle

• loaded to the plimsoll mark

• to have a bun on

• to have a slant on

• to have a skate on

• to have a snootfull

• to have a skinful

• to draw a blank

• to pull a shut-eye

• to pull a Daniel Boone

• to have a rubber drink

• to have a hangover

• to have a head

• to have the jumps to have the shakes

• to have the zings

• to have the heeby-jeebies

• to have the screaming-meemies

• to have the whoops and jingles

• to burn with a low blue flame

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Extracted from Lists of Note, edited by Shaun Usher. Originally from American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Twenties and Thirties. Copyright © 1958 by Edmund Wilson. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House.